ELEGANT DOVE

This is the year Linda Michelle Trainer expects to fly to exotic places as a senior flight attendant for the American Trans Air charter airline.

This is the year she expects to finish organizing Elegant Doves, a support group for victims of incest.

This is the year she expects to spend some quiet time with her husband, Robert, listening to music and watching the Detroit River from the window of their loft on Lafayette Boulevard in Detroit.

''This Is the Year,'' by Russel A. Kemp, is one of her favorite poems, an affirmation that good things will happen, dreams will come true.

The year got off to a flying start when she won an award for having changed the course of her life after age 30 and becoming a role model for women.

She squeaked past the age requirement (she was born Christmas Day, 1959)

when she wrote the essay last June that helped her win one of the $1,000

''Take Charge'' awards Clairol gives to 25 women each year.

The citation says Trainer is proof that women in tragic circumstances can ''pick themselves up and overcome such obstacles through desperation, determination and sheer grit.''

That is exactly what she did. As a child Trainer suffered the emotional scars of sexual abuse was sexually abused and as a teenager had to cope with the disfigurement of breast surgery for tumors.

''She has been a real inspiration to me,'' says her friend Andrea Ashford. ''I`ve seen her have a lot of lows, and she`s continually telling me she`s not giving up and she will prevail.''

As program director of Teen Development Workshops, Ashford has worked with Trainer for the last two years, presenting career workshops for teenage girls at Detroit churches and schools.

She ''helps them bridge the gap between their everyday lives and what they can plan and aspire to,'' Ashford says.

More and more, Trainer says, she talks to them frankly about incest and other problems she has endured, encouraging girls with similar problems to talk with her.

And she is using the example of these career workshops as she forms a non-profit group, Elegant Doves, in which she plans free individual counseling for girls and group seminars and activities to help rebuild self-images. In some cases, she says, she will recommend professional help.

She knows the importance of being able to talk: She recalls the dread she felt, listening for footsteps in the night, of wanting everything to appear normal.

She says she was threatened, not with physical violence, but with making family members hate each other: ''`If you tell your parents,''` she was told, '' `they`ll hate me and that will make them hate you. You will have destroyed a loving family.''`

She didn`t tell anyone until she was about 16. First she told a friend. Then she wrote a letter to her mother and watched her read it. Her mother simply hugged her, but still they did not talk about it, not for another three years and never easily.

Trainer says strong religious values helped her through. But at 17 she faced another trauma: surgery to remove several benign breast tumors.

''I made a bargain with God that I would help other girls'' in exchange for help then, she says.

She was buoyed by a nurse who came in at night and simply held her hand. And when she feared her scars would keep any man from wanting to marry her, Trainer`s mother assured her that beauty was more than physical and that love would see beyond any scar.

Now she wears a sequin-decorated denim jacket with the slogan for her support group on the back: ''Elegant Doves turn scars to stars.''

She chose ''elegant'' because she wants those she counsels to have a beautiful self-image and ''doves'' because of biblical references she loves.

The other words are from Robert Schuller, a broadcast minister and author she admires.

She encourages teens to follow her example in starting a positive-thinking scrapbook.

Into it go encouraging verses from the Bible and other religious sources, poems, magazine ads, pictures of favorite places or things, symbols of things hoped for-anything that will cheer or inspire the book`s owner to work toward goals.

One page in her book begins with the words ''Yes I can'' and includes the names of several places around the world, including Paris.

It was not long after she created the page that she got the job with Trans Air, she says-''and my first trip was to Paris.''

She still has other dreams, other pictures in the scrapbook that begins with the poem ''This Is the Year.''